Elizabeth of Spalbeek

2019 ◽  
pp. 83-116
Author(s):  
Sean L. Field
Keyword(s):  

Elizabeth of Spalbeek was already a well-known if controversial visionary by 1276. In that year a prophecy was attributed to her in which she claimed that God was angry with King Philip III because of the king’s sins against nature. The papal legate Simon of Brie verified that he had heard a similar rumor. In the course of four separate missions to question Elizabeth, the party of Pierre de La Broce and Bishop Pierre de Benais also attributed to her the prophetic claim that Queen Marie of Brabant had poisoned her stepson, the heir to the throne. In the end Elizabeth relied on staunch denial, and chose to silence her own prophetic voice to avoid censure.

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lufuluvhi Maria Mudimeli

This article is a reflection on the role and contribution of the church in a democratic South Africa. The involvement of the church in the struggle against apartheid is revisited briefly. The church has played a pivotal and prominent role in bringing about democracy by being a prophetic voice that could not be silenced even in the face of death. It is in this time of democracy when real transformation is needed to take its course in a realistic way, where the presence of the church has probably been latent and where it has assumed an observer status. A look is taken at the dilemmas facing the church. The church should not be bound and taken captive by any form of loyalty to any political organisation at the expense of the poor and the voiceless. A need for cooperation and partnership between the church and the state is crucial at this time. This paper strives to address the role of the church as a prophetic voice in a democratic South Africa. Radical economic transformation, inequality, corruption, and moral decadence—all these challenges hold the potential to thwart our young democracy and its ideals. Black liberation theology concepts are employed to explore how the church can become prophetically relevant in democracy. Suggestions are made about how the church and the state can best form partnerships. In avoiding taking only a critical stance, the church could fulfil its mandate “in season and out of season” and continue to be a prophetic voice on behalf of ordinary South Africans.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh

The Chinese rites controversy (c.1582–1742) is typically characterized as a religious quarrel between different Catholic orders over whether it was permissible for Chinese converts to observe traditional rites and use the terms tian and shangdi to refer to the Christian God. As such, it is often argued that the conflict was shaped predominantly by the divergent theological attitudes between the rites-supporting Jesuits and their anti-rites opponents towards “accommodation.” By examining the Jesuit missionary Kilian Stumpf's Acta Pekinensia—a detailed chronicle of the papal legate Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon's 1705–6 investigation into the controversy in Beijing—this article proposes that ostensibly religious disputes between Catholic orders consisted primarily of disagreements over ancient Chinese history. Stumpf's text shows that missionaries’ understandings of antiquity were constructed through their interpretations of ancient Chinese books and their interactions with the Kangxi Emperor. The article suggests that the historiographical characterization of the controversy as “religious” has its roots in the Vatican suppression of the rites, which served to erase the historical nature of the conflict exposed in the Acta Pekinensia.


Author(s):  
Susannah Heschel

The friendship between Abraham Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr was both personal and intellectual. Neighbours on the Upper West Side of New York City, they walked together in Riverside park and shared personal concerns in private letters; Niebuhr asked Heschel to deliver the eulogy at his funeral. They were bound by shared religious sensibilities as well, including their love of the Hebrew Bible, the irony they saw in American history and in the writings of the Hebrew prophets, and in their commitment to social justice as a duty to God. Heschel arrived in the public sphere later, as a public intellectual with a prophetic voice, much as Niebuhr had been for many decades prior. Niebuhr’s affirmation of the affinities between his and Heschel’s theological scholarship pays tribute to an extraordinary friendship of Protestant and Jew.


1993 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 119-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Wathey

Towards the end of August 1350, Petrarch wrote from his home at Padua to Philippe de Vitry, chastising his friend for a letter that he had sent to their mutual patron, Cardinal Guy de Boulogne, papal legate in Italy. Vitry's mind has slowed since their first acquaintance, writes Petrarch, so that he now considers even a glorious absence from France undesirable. The man who, when asked where he was from, answered that he was a citizen of the world, now thinks any departure from France an exile. The dust of France lies too heavily on his shoes; the Petit-Pont in Paris, ‘its arch not quite in the shape of a tortoise shell’, is too appealing to him, and the murmur of the Seine delights his ear too much.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Graham D. Stanton

Abstract This article summarises eight theological perspectives on youth and young people. Young people are variously seen as (1) sinful creatures in need of redemption; (2) gifts of God and sources of joy; (3) developing beings in need of guidance and instruction; (4) open to conversion; (5) vulnerable to exploitation; (6) fully human, made in God’s image; (7) a prophetic presence; and (8) a prophetic voice. Rather than simply affirm all 8 perspectives as important, an integrated theological perspective on youth views young people within the distinctive features of their created reality, with particular strengths and assets along with distinct needs and deficits, to be fully capable as bearers of the divine image, and with emerging capability as social agents.


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